Bonow told the Seattle Times that their goal is “humanizing, normalizing and de-stigmatizing” abortion. She said their new book has almost 100 stories of people from age 19 to 85 who have had abortions.

Sharing about aborting her own unborn baby, she wrote: “I’m telling you my story plainly, proudly, flippantly even, because we have all been brainwashed to believe that the absence of negative emotions around having an abortion is the mark of an emotionally bankrupt person. It’s not. I have a good heart and my abortion made me happy.”

After sharing her story in 2015, the campaign took off. According to the report:

Her friend, the Seattle writer Lindy West, read the piece and added the hashtag — #ShoutYourAbortion — that was retweeted over 150,000 times.

Stories started pouring in from all corners of the country. From older women and younger, established professionals and students just starting out. They came from victims of incest and rape, people of different genders and political and religious backgrounds. Some were trapped in abusive relationships, or weren’t medically able to carry a wanted pregnancy.

The stories serve to combat anti-choice rhetoric that Bonow and West believe keep people in secrecy, shame, poverty, toxic and abusive relationships and devalue their ambitions.

… In the time since, Bonow has created a Seattle nonprofit, traveled the country and over the last year, and with the help of West and editor Emily Nokes, turned some of the essays into a book that she called “a physical manifestation of a movement.”

The pro-abortion news site Rewire claimed the revived “Shout Your Abortion” campaign is needed now more than ever as pro-life leaders work tirelessly to end abortion or, as the site phrased it, “the legislative and judicial attacks on reproductive rights” in America.

“The significance of the book—and books of its kind—cannot be overstated,” Rewire claimed. “For Bonow and her colleagues, these pieces of our cultural history had to be recorded in such an unapologetic way because the times we’re living through call for nothing less.”

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